The present disclosure relates generally to patient monitoring systems, and more particularly to preventing falls by detecting patient movement data associated with patient posture and activity levels.
Patients having physical disabilities, or who have recently undergone surgical procedures, may not have the strength or coordination to safely exit their beds without assistance due to compromised strength, stamina, coordination, etc. Such individuals, however, may occasionally attempt to get out of bed and walk around without assistance because they believe that they can do so safely or because they fail to understand their physical limitations. There may be a high risk of injury to these individuals if they attempt to exit their beds when it is not safe to do so.
Some hospitals or care facilities employ “sitters” to remain in the room with the patient at all times to ensure that the patient does not attempt to exit the bed without assistance. However, hiring sitters can be costly for already understaffed healthcare centers. Other systems may include physically tethering patients to their beds, but such methods may be excessively restrictive for patients in the long term.
Other known methods may monitor an individual in bed using, for example, bed-based pressure sensors and/or video monitoring. Pressure sensors may detect when a user leaves the bed, but, at that point, it may be too late to prevent the patient from falling and sustaining an injury. Video monitoring may employ virtual gating to detect the patient's movement out of the bed, but is often subject to false positives, for example when the patient reaches across the virtual gate to grab a glass of water, thereby triggering an alert falsely indicating that the patient has left or is attempting to leave the bed.
Therefore, improvements in remote monitoring of bed-ridden patients may be beneficial.